The need to speed up work on a reliable system for predicting potential aftershocks in the days following a strong earthquake has become more urgent, say US scientists, after a rare quake earlier this year was found to have triggered many large, and potentially damaging, earthquakes around the world.

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Writing in Nature last month (26 September), researchers said that the magnitude 8.6 earthquake that struck off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, on 11 April this year unleashed an unprecedented number of large events as far away as Japan and Mexico.

"The number of earthquakes worldwide of more than [magnitude 5.5] increased by a factor of five over a six-day period," Roland Burgmann, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, United States, and one of the authors of the report, told SciDev.Net.